Memorial Page for Jacques Chirac (née Jacques René Chirac)

Jacques Chirac (born 29 November 1932 in Paris; died 26 September 2019 in Paris) was a French politician. He served as prime minister, mayor of Paris for almost two decades and president of the French Republic from 1995 to 2007. Chirac was one of the defining figures of the French right after Charles de Gaulle: approachable in public style, highly conscious of power structures, often pragmatic in ideology and present long enough at the centre of politics to shape French domestic and foreign policy across generations.

Education and rise

Chirac came from a bourgeois Parisian family, studied at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris and trained at the École nationale d'administration. After military service and administrative work, he entered politics early. In Corrèze he built a regional power base that supported him for decades. In 1967 he was elected to the National Assembly and soon became a junior minister and then a minister. His style combined technocratic training with a feel for markets, agricultural fairs, direct speech and political loyalties.

Prime minister and mayor of Paris

In 1974 Valéry Giscard d'Estaing appointed him prime minister. The alliance soon broke down, and Chirac founded the Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République in 1976. A year later he became mayor of Paris. That office gave him staff, visibility and a dense political network. It also left him vulnerable to later investigations: cases involving fictitious jobs and party financing in Paris remained part of his public image long after he left City Hall.

President of a divided republic

After several failed attempts, Chirac won the presidency in 1995. He promised to reduce France's social divide, but soon governed with austerity and reform pressure. In 1997 his camp lost its majority after an early legislative election; the following years were marked by cohabitation with the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. Chirac therefore remained a head of state with international visibility, while many domestic decisions belonged to the left-led government.

Vel d'Hiv, republic and history

One of his most important gestures was the speech of 16 July 1995 on the Vel d'Hiv roundup. Chirac explicitly acknowledged the responsibility of the French state for the deportation of Jews during the German occupation. In doing so he broke with an older line that had placed responsibility mainly on the Vichy regime. That acknowledgement did not erase the contradictions of his presidency, but it visibly changed official French memory politics.

Second term and the Iraq War

In 2002 Chirac reached the runoff against Jean-Marie Le Pen. Many voters supported him then not out of enthusiasm, but to block the National Front. His second term became internationally marked by opposition to the Iraq War in 2003. Foreign minister Dominique de Villepin defended that line at the United Nations, but the political decision belonged to Chirac. At home his record remained mixed: unrest in the suburbs, the lost referendum on the European constitutional treaty in 2005 and economic stagnation showed the limits of his presidency.

Farewell

Chirac left the Élysée Palace in 2007. In 2011 he was convicted of embezzling public funds during his time as mayor of Paris; because of health problems he did not attend the trial in person. Jacques Chirac died in Paris on 26 September 2019. He was 86 years old. His political path remains tied to an unusual length of time at the centre of French power: charm and instinct, republican gestures, foreign-policy independence and the darker sides of a system in which party, city administration and personal networks long overlapped.